Carlo Fonseka: the far-sighted Professor
Source:www.dailynews.lk
“Some may wonder what unique qualification I have to be chosen to deliver the inaugural Carlo Fonseka lecture, other than of course, outright cronyism. But, very few in this audience, apart from his children, have had the privilege of sitting on his knee and listening to his stories
This was in the United Kingdom, where in the mid-1960’s he and my father were postgraduate students. The stories were both bribe and reward for chaperoning his daughter Indunil to the school that she and I attended. That is how long I knew him for, over 55 years – first as a little boy spellbound by his stories, then as a medical student captivated by his teaching, and subsequently as a junior colleague in the university.
In Shakespeare’s play, when Mark Anthony delivered his funeral oration for Julius Caesar, he begins by saying “Friends, Romans and countrymen, lend me your ears. I have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” Anthony continues by damning the conspirators with faint praise, obliquely raising public anger at Caesar’s assassination. This evening, however, there will be nothing neither faint nor oblique about my lecture, which intends to unabashedly celebrate the memory of one of Sri Lanka’s greatest intellectuals, Prof Carlo Fonseka.
Carlo Fonseka was born on March 4, 1933, and passed away on September 2, 2019, aged 86 years.
He was educated at Maris Stella College, Negombo and St. Joseph’s College, Colombo. After school, he joined the Ceylon University’s Medical Faculty in Colombo in 1955. He graduated MBBS in 1960 with a first class and the Perry Exhibition for best performance in the Final MBBS.
He then joined the Ceylon University’s Physiology Department as a lecturer in 1962. In 1966, he obtained a PhD. from the Edinburgh University and returned to Ceylon in 1967. He was a professor at the department from 1982 to 1989.
In 1991, as its Founder Dean, he took on the huge challenge of establishing a new Medical Faculty for the Kelaniya University, when the North Colombo Medical College was vested in the state after a prolonged period of civil unrest. He served as Dean until 1997. He was also a member of the University Grants Commission and Chairman of the Board of Management of the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine, Colombo. Professor Fonseka was awarded honorary fellowships by the Ceylon College of Physicians and the Sri Lanka College of General Practitioners, and after his retirement, he was awarded Emeritus Professorships by both the Colombo University and the Kelaniya University.
Professor Fonseka was the Chairman of the National Authority on Tobacco and Alcohol, and was one of six South-East Asia Region awardees of the World No Tobacco Day-2012 awards. And, well into his retirement, in 2012, he was appointed President of the Sri Lanka Medical Council, a post that he held for five years.
Professor Carlo Fonseka was also actively engaged in the Arts, and in Sri Lankan politics. He obtained a M.A. degree in Buddhist Studies from the Kelaniya University in 1999, served as President of the Arts Council of Sri Lanka – a very rare honour for a scientist, and was decorated by the Japanese Government for his services to strengthen the bond of friendship between Sri Lanka and Japan through enhanced cultural interaction. He was a lyricist and composer producing a number of albums including Carlochita Gee, Raththaran Duwe and Koida Kiya; he also composed our Faculty Anthem. Politically, the fire-brand orator-Carlo Fonseka was a prominent member of the Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP). He was a member of the party’s Central Committee and Politburo, and led its branch in Kotte.
Prof. Carlo Fonseka was, then, a modern-day polymath; a doctor, teacher, public speaker, political activist, philosopher, musician and lyric writer. To me, he was a teacher, mentor, advisor and friend. Our personal bond was very strong, and was never broken. That is, however, not to say that he and I had no differences in our opinions on life in general, as well as in our likes and dislikes; and this was not limited to politics.
Once, when he was writing the lyrics and composing music for one of his songs, I tactlessly told him that I didn’t think very much of modern Sinhala music. He retorted that he thought anyone who liked, let alone played, rugby – he of course meant me, had to have an IQ of a monkey. At another time, during one of our more serious conversations, of which there were many, I told him that, “the public of this country has paid for my education so that I can serve them and the country by doing what I was actually trained to do – be a physician, teach my students medicine, and do scientific research; not waste my time on endless waffle about what Karl Marx or Bertrand Russell would have said about this, that or the other.”
Lamenting the fact that he thought I had not had proper liberal education and was not as widely read in philosophy and politics as I ought to have been, he said, “Janaka, you may be a professor of medicine who can do wonders with an endoscope, and publish hundreds of research papers, but to me that doesn’t make you much more than a good technician. The only saving grace is your interest in history and archaeology. It is still not too late, educate yourself.”
It was a stinging rebuke, and I have tried hard to better my education ever since. Prof. Carlo was a free thinker, a liberal to the core. Religious bigotry, racism, homophobia and misogyny had no place in his worldview. However, he sometimes went a bit too far for the more polite sections of our society; for example, his tongue-in-cheek advice to parents on the marriage of their children was that “They should definitely marry only Homo sapiens.”
Despite our differences of opinion on some issues, Prof. Carlo and I shared many values, chief among them being an unshakable commitment to free education and healthcare, a passion for teaching, and an enduring love for this faculty. So, I will confine the rest of this lecture to Professor Carlo Fonseka, the academic and university administrator, and not Professor Carlo Fonseka, the polymath.
Professor Carlo was, quite simply, one of the best lecturers, if not the best, I have ever listened to, and I have been around. When teaching, he was good-natured and non-threatening; he never singled out students for ridicule. His lectures were simple, fluent and entertaining. The take-home message was always clear. The language style would vary widely from the sophistication of stating Claude Bernard’s concept of the milieu intérieur in French, to crude Sinhala mnemonics, to help us remember things; for example, the mnemonic he made up for the symptoms of obstructive jaundice, which are, jaundice, itching, dark coloured urine and pale stools was, “Kahanawo, kahanawo; as thekath kahawuno; choo nikan the wage; goo nikan mati wage” – I still remember it, word for word, after nearly 45 years.
At the start of my academic career at Peradeniya, I presented a paper at the Sri Lanka Medical Association. Prof. Carlo was in the audience. After the lecture, he told me, “The science was good, but there were spelling mistakes in your slides and your arms were waving about like the wings of a bat out of hell.” His advice to budding lecturers, like me at that time, was, “First, lecture to a mirror so that you can see how funny you look and sound with all the unnecessary gestures and mispronunciations you make, so that you can correct them”. He stressed the importance of careful preparation for lectures, however short or whoever the audience; the painstaking attention to detail so that there be not a single spelling or grammatical error; timing the lecture to the minute; and always keeping to the script, with even the jokes in-between, planned. He explained the art of making students relax by saying, “You look so worried. Don’t be, I knew much less than you when I was a student”; to be pleasant and to never intimidate or bully, simply because terrified students didn’t learn. He said, “When lecturing, target the lower-than-average students, because it is they who must understand what we teach the most. If they don’t understand you, you should accept that it is you who has failed, and just try harder.” No textbook of medical education has explained the principles of effective teaching and lecturing to me with such clarity.
Although his doctoral thesis on the “Regulation of Growth Hormone” entered standard textbooks of physiology, Prof. Carlo was not a researcher in the way we now measure researchers – by how many papers they have published, their h-index, or wheether they were named in Stanford University’s list of the top researchers. In his time, neither were many others.
But he was a scientist. His rationalist brain could not accept a benevolent, all-powerful creator of everything or the existence of supernatural beings. He was convinced of the superiority of science over false beliefs, and demanded, and relentlessly searched for, evidence. One example is the manner in which he proved that the ritual of fire-walking did not need divine intervention, but rather moving very nimbly over the hot embers thereby reducing the contact time between them and the person’s feet. And, to bury the myth of the religious significance attached to fire walking once and for all, it is said that Prof. Carlo and his volunteers deliberately enjoyed a sacrilegious snack of pork and arrack just before their fire-walk. Not surprisingly, the holy men had been furious and collectively cursed him, but science had triumphed.
There is no doubt that Prof. Carlo was being too hard on himself, because we all know how common ill-health or adverse effects resulting from medical treatment are. But he delighted in provoking his audience with uncomfortable truths, and this time it was the turn of the medical profession.
As an administrator, Prof. Carlo was the only Dean that I know of, who had more trouble than me, reading and understanding financial statements and audit reports – and that is saying a lot. His desk was a chaotic heap of documents piled high, and for me, who has been accused of being obsessive and compulsive, the desk was pure torture to behold whenever I visited his office.
But, these aside, I learned more about good administration and management from Prof. Carlo than I did by reading or listening to lectures given by acclaimed experts on the subject. His management style was simply to lead by example. He was fixated on fairness and merit, and always took responsibility for, and fearlessly admitted to, his mistakes. Disruptive students who had openly defied and were hostile to him, and were then apprehensive about their future in medical school, ended up passing examinations with flying colours; and Prof. Carlo would call them to his office and personally congratulate them.
When a student had been failed in a subject which was later, sometimes much later, discovered to have been due to an error in the entry or computation of marks, he would take the revised marks to the University Senate, admit and take responsibility for the mistake, bear the criticism, but make sure that the student concerned passed. Part of this was because he was a naturally kind man, who went out of his way to help students. He once told me, “Discipline students when necessary, but never-ever harm them, because they are children who have been entrusted to us, to nurture for five years, and then send out to serve society.”
In 1991, when he was appointed as Dean at the new Medical Faculty in the Kelaniya University, he had two options. The safer one was to go along with the establishment and the political powers of that time to curry their favour, follow traditional wisdom and pack the faculty with very senior and well-connected teachers, many of whom were retired from the government service. The other was to chart a more difficult, but exciting and futuristic course for the fledgling faculty, one which would endow the faculty with a sense of special identity and an understanding of how future medical education should be organised.
He firmly and decisively rejected the first option. “I don’t want this young faculty full of tired and retired people,” he famously told the vacillating Vice-Chancellor and University Council. I was present at that meeting, as a Senate Nominee to the Council. Gradually wearing them down by force of argument, he single-handedly, got his way.
As a result, in the early years, our faculty had few academic staff, so recruitment had to go on apace. As the Dean, Prof. Carlo insisted on recruiting only the highest achievers; not who’s-who. Preference was given to those who were, or had the potential to be, good researchers. In his own words, “Mediocre institutional inbreeding was more or less taboo.” It was merit and ability, above all else. As word of his fairness and transparency spread, the university received a flood of applications when posts in the Medical Faculty were advertised. Spoilt for choice, the faculty was, for the most part, able to recruit bright young academics, who have since ensured the strong research culture that is seen in Ragama today. Prof. Carlo rejoiced in, never envied, their success.
He was also a genius at the art of delegation, a skill I eagerly learnt from him. In his own words, “Given the incendiary circumstances in which the Faculty was conceived and struggled to be born ………. my greatest achievement was that the faculty did not flounder under my stewardship. On the contrary it flourished. The secret of why it flourished must not die with me. ……. The only art I have mastered is taking credit by getting others to do the blooming work………… I believe that a new institution will flourish if able young people have executive power to run it.”
But he did not throw “his able young people” to the crocodiles. He took time and effort to mentor and guide them. “Never publicly say or write anything in anger. Because even if you do regret it later, the damage will have already been done.” One of the best pieces of advice he gave at that time to young hot-heads like me. This was said in the presence of our current Vice-Chancellor, who will vouch for me.
Prof. Carlo was a democrat, and would let discussions at meetings go on for hours, much to the annoyance of some of us. His reasoning was unfaultable, “Let all who want to, express their views; sometimes a good idea or a solution to a difficult problem may materialise, but more importantly, people should feel that they have been heard.” Despite this, he was very brief when talking about himself. At the last meeting before he retired, members of the University Senate paid glowing tributes to him, one after another. When, after about an hour, it finally came for his time to respond he stood up, and memorably said, “I will be brief. Thank you,” and sat down.
As Dean, Prof. Carlo was also instrumental in establishing two new disciplines at Ragama. The subject of Family Medicine, for which he had to overcome fierce resistance from some quarters, and Disability Studies, an area still unique to us in the Sri Lankan university system, which has grown from a small unit to a fully-fledged department awarding its own degree, working out of the state-of-the-art Ayathi National Centre for Children with Disabilities. As it turned out, both were far-sighted decisions.
This was, in a nutshell, Professor Carlo Fonseka, the legendary teacher, philosopher-scientist and university administrator – with his own unique style, from whom we learnt so much. By the time he retired in 1998, he had set the stage for our Faculty to progress along very distinctive lines – from being a thorn in the side of our university to becoming a jewel in its crown.
But there was so much more to this great man, who though not without his flaws, was full of human goodness.
He was royalty among Sri Lankan academics. Despite this, he was a simple man, with simple, sometimes quirky, tastes. For example, he disliked wearing socks – an aversion, I recently learnt, that he shared with no less a person than Albert Einstein, and when rarely he wore a tie, one of an old stringy pair that was already knotted and hanging in his office, more often than not, it did not match his shirt.
One day, dressed in a particularly badly matching tie and shirt, and without socks, of course, I dropped him off for an event for which he was the chief guest. I then saw him looking helpless after what seemed like an animated discussion with the security guard at the entrance to the building. I went to up to them in time to hear Prof. Carlo appealing in Sinhala “please son, I am the chief guest,” to which the guard replied “that doesn’t matter, if you want to go in, show me your invitation.” It took me a few minutes to explain to the rather dull guard that the person who he was not allowing into the building was Professor Carlo Fonseka. The guard nearly fell to his knees. Prof. Carlo smiled, patted the guard on his shoulder, and thanked him for finally letting him go in. This was so typical of the man, and a lesson to us all, that a true king wears his crown lightly on his head. And for me, his devoted student, what more can I ask for, than to see my portrait hanging right beside his in our Faculty Boardroom.
Colombo and Kelaniya have fought for Prof. Carlo’s affection, and still do, to claim ownership of his memory. But we all know who won, because what better way for him to show where his heart really was than his final wish to donate his mortal remains to the faculty that he founded and loved.
